OLDaily

Digital Learning Platforms In, LXP out
Craig Weiss, The Craig Weiss Group, 2019/09/06

Is there really much of a difference between a learning experience platform (LXP) and a learning management system (LMS)? There are some differences, but those differences are being obfuscated, according to Craig Weiss. "Too many vendors are using learning experience as part of their pitch, their SEO to attract consumers who do not want an LMS.  Not because they may not need one, but because they are receiving mixed messages. And the people behind those mixed messages are the same people trying to sell you their system."

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Learning Science: The Problem With Data, And How You Can Measure Anything
Julian Stodd, Julian Stodd's Learning Blog, 2019/09/06

I'm linking to this mostly to introduce Julian Stodd's blog to OLDaily; there's a lot of interesting content in the archives, including especially quite creative illustrations. This particular article advances a contentious proposition, that we can measure anything. Here's the gist: qualitative data is also a type of measurement, but it's vague or ambiguous, and may vary depending on point of view. What 'heavy' means, for example, might depend on one's own context. Certainly there are examples of qualities that are imprecisely stated quantities. But other qualities are arguably not quantifiable at all.

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Chatting with Chatbots
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2019/09/06

This article reports on the increased use of chatbots in higher education. Anything - anything - has to be better than a telephone menu. "Colleges initially were deploying this technology only in specific areas, such as financial aid, IT services or the library. Now institutions are looking to deploy chatbots with much broader capability." The article plugs a chatbot companies  AdmitHub and Ivy.ai, and suggests institutions will want more generalized chatbots in the future.

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A Successful Artificial Memory Has Been Created
Robert Martone, Scientific American, 2019/09/06

There's a lot of room for this to be less spectacular than advertised. Still. "Investigators reverse engineered a specific natural memory by mapped the brain circuits underlying its formation. They then 'trained' another animal by stimulating brain cells in the pattern of the natural memory." As the article says, there are social and ethical factors to consider here. If successful, this takes deep fakes to another level. It's hard enough to know which of our thoughts to trust without the possibility that someone else has been authoring them.

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